Emancipation Proclamation (1863)

At the beginning of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln's primary purpose was to preserve the United States intact. However, the issue of slavery received much public attention. As the U.S. Army began to move into Confederate states, escaped slaves sought refuge within its lines. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, however, legally bound people to assist in the apprehension and return of fugitives. Regardless, some Union generals attempted to protect the fugitives, arguing they were “contraband of war” and thus could legally be seized, while others refused sanctuary and instead returned them to their owners. In March 1862, Congress enacted a law prohibiting the return of fugitive slaves, but the question remained uncertain because of existing federal laws and previous decisions by the Supreme Court.

By 1862, Lincoln wanted to push the issue through a presidential proclamation, but at the time there was a long string of Union defeats on the eastern battlefields in 1861 and 1862 that led some of the president's advisers to believe any such move would be interpreted as an act of desperation. When the Confederate invasion of the north that fall was repelled at the Battle of Antie-tam on September 17, Lincoln used the occasion to proclaim a northern victory and to announce his intention to emancipate slaves in the Confederate states as of January 1, 1863. Since the stated intention was to free slaves in the rebelling states only, the announcement left open the possibility that if a state resumed allegiance to the United States prior to January 1, it would be able to avoid emancipation.

The final Emancipation Proclamation ordered that “all persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever, free.” Lincoln's action made emancipation a central objective of the war, holding out the promise of freedom for over three million people enslaved in the areas defined by the proclamation. While this outraged the south and angered antiwar Democrats and Copperheads in the north, it energized the abolitionists and other antislavery factions and had international implications that were especially important at the time. The south hoped to gain foreign assistance, especially from Great Britain, which appeared to be dependent on southern cotton to feed its huge textile industry. But Great Britain had already prohibited slavery in its empire and the British laboring class was largely antislavery. Thus, the Emancipation Proclamation gained the support of many Britons and is usually considered to be one factor that convinced the British government against open intervention in the Civil War.